The Best American Essays 2013 (20 page)

By the time New Year’s Eve rolled around, I had decided to write my will. I wrote it like a letter, like an apology. It almost felt ridiculous to say who got what. I didn’t have much to give anyway. Books to that person, CDs to that person, my crappy dishes and old computer. My clothes. Whom would I put in charge of distributing my clothes? Who would want to wear the clothes of a sad, dead man?

The girlfriend I had broken up with had a friend who’d (sort of) committed suicide a few years before we met. He was a policeman, and one night, after an argument, he went to his girlfriend’s apartment and waved his gun around, distraught. He turned the gun on himself, and it went off. His girlfriend tried to help him, but it was no use. The girlfriend told her friends afterward that she tried to hold his head together. The girlfriend told people she heard the sound of his blood glugging out. The girlfriend would later tell people that she could no longer listen to the sound of someone pouring wine.

After the funeral, his friends split up his possessions. My girlfriend got a bunch of his CDs. They were mixed into our combined music collection when we lived together. They had his name written on them. She would never sell them. Sometimes we would listen to them with just slightly more reverence than usual.

One of the strange things about this guy’s death was that it was on a New Year’s Eve, which was the same date I was writing my will on. It’s the day when you look back at the year and try to figure out if it was good or not. This was not a particularly good year for me. I mean, part of me realized that I had taken some important steps to learn more about myself, but another part of me knew I was hurting the most important people around me and that I was worn-out. I thought to myself that the bad stuff in my life outweighed the good and that I had turned into a negative force. I thought maybe this was where it should end. I told myself I had done all I could do in my life. I knew how Chris felt now.
Nobody needs me
. I wanted to get it over with.

I didn’t know how I would do it, though. I was by myself on New Year’s Eve, and it was early evening. I didn’t have a gun, and I didn’t think I was strong enough to plunge a knife into my gut. I didn’t think I could hang myself, because I don’t know how to make a noose out of bed sheets. I thought drugs would be nice, but I didn’t have enough money to buy sleeping pills. I had imagined, during an earlier depressed period, that running into traffic would work. Maybe I could jump off an overpass into traffic. But what if I didn’t time it right, and I bounced off someone’s hood and broke my back instead? What if I became paralyzed?

I sat in the dark most of the night wondering what to do. I thought about my parents and what they would say if I died. I was never that close with my parents, so I came to the conclusion that they wouldn’t care. I mean, they would care, but it wouldn’t shatter them. I thought about my friends and concluded the same thing. I’m not sure why, but I figured they would be sad for a few fleeting moments and then they would move on. These were my pity party thoughts.

My son was a different story. I couldn’t pretend this wasn’t going to affect him. All I could do was think of my son in the future and imagine what it would be like for him to always tell people that when he was fourteen, his father committed suicide.

Fourteen. An age when every emotion you feel is magnified ten times over and misunderstood a hundred times over. An age that will be frozen in time if anything terrible happens within its sweaty, painful, pubescent months. Those teen years are when the scars happen. The scars you have to tend to the rest of your life, hoping they heal or fade away.

I grabbed a photo album full of school pictures and snapshots of my son. I thought about Chris showing me the photo of his daughter and how he wouldn’t let it go.

My son looks like me when I was a kid. You can see it in photos. There were some old photos of me mixed into the album I was looking at, and I held them side by side with photos of my son. We had the same pimples, broad shoulders, and awkward grin. Our clothes were even sort of similar—mine from the 1970s, his from the 2000s. You can even see how we had the same toys: Hot Wheels and Legos.

I showed him
Star Wars
when he was ten, the same age I was when I saw it. I showed him Winnie the Pooh and Little Critter books. I played football with him in the park. I taught him how to hit a baseball. We wrestled in the living room. I took him to Dairy Queen, and sometimes we walked to get doughnuts on Saturday morning. I played board games with him, and even though I don’t like board games, I was glad we spent the time together.

I wanted to do more with him. I wanted to teach him how to drive. I wanted to give him money for a date. I wanted to go to his graduations. I wanted to give him advice on something. I wanted to go to a bar with him. I wanted to do something for him that would always be there. I wanted to make him proud of me.

Just after midnight I went to bed. I had decided to tough it out. I decided to live. I sent my son a text message as I listened to people celebrating outside my window. It said:
Happy New Year. Let’s make it a good one. I love you
. Less than a minute later, he responded:
Love you too
.

I got in bed and wrapped my blankets around me like I was in a cocoon. I let those words sit in my heart for a long while. I breathed in deep, sucking in gulps of air and crying more. Then I tried to make my mind go blank until the morning. I pretended that everything would be okay when the sun came out.

The next morning I woke up and shaved and took a shower and drank my coffee. I went to work and took my position behind the info desk. The store opened two hours late because it was New Year’s Day. Customers came filing in, looking for books, looking for stories. Looking for the bathroom. I sat there, feeling fresh-faced and feeling like a survivor. I was ready to help anyone who needed it.

EILEEN POLLACK

FROM
Prairie Schooner

N
OT LONG AGO
I went back to my elementary school, a Gothic brick-and-mortar fortress whose Escher-like stairs dead-end on floors that lie halfway between other floors and whose halls branch off into mysterious tunnels that suddenly disgorge a student into the cafeteria, or the girls’ locker room, or the balcony of benches overlooking the auditorium that doubles as the gym. Like most people who hated school, I wasn’t surprised to find my younger self crying at the back of this or that classroom, or staring up at some adult whose behavior had left me baffled, or wandering the gloomy stairwells, wondering if I would ever find my way out to a sunnier, less confusing, less confining life outside.

What startled me was how often I glimpsed the ghosts of classmates whose existence I had forgotten, the ones whose lives, even then, must have been far more troubled than my own, and who—even though there were fewer than one hundred students in my class—disappeared from my consciousness long before the rest of us had moved on to high school, let alone to college. Seeing those ghostly classmates, I wanted to bend down and comfort them, as I had comforted my own younger self. I wanted to assure them that everything would be all right. But I felt the way a doctor must feel approaching a patient who is waiting for a pathology report the doctor knows contains devastating news.

My own malady wasn’t fatal, although it felt so at the time. The symptoms started in third grade, the day a stranger appeared at our classroom door and summoned me to the hall. My classmates and I were making cardboard headbands on which to glue the feathers we had won for good behavior. A good Indian was defined by her ability to walk to the bathroom without speaking to her partner or digging a finger in his spine. (That was the year we discovered just how vulnerable the human body is. Twist a thumb between two vertebrae and watch your victim writhe. Place the tip of your shoe at the back of his rigid knee and effect complete collapse.) The edges of my headband kept sticking to my fingers. Not that I had any feathers to paste on the cardboard anyway.

“This is Mr. Spiro, the school psychologist,” my teacher said. “He wants to talk to you in his office.” Then she went back in and shut the door.

I had been causing a lot of trouble. The year before, my teacher had joked that she was going to bring in her dirty laundry to keep me occupied. In reality, Mrs. Hoos had the sense to let me do whatever I wanted, as long as I didn’t disturb my neighbors. At the start of each day, I stowed a dozen books beneath my seat and read them one by one, looking up to see if she was teaching us something new, which she rarely if ever was.

I still love Gertrude Hoos, who was as lumpy and soft as the bag of dirty laundry I gladly would have washed if only she had brought it in. But my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Neff, was made of starchier, sterner stuff. By God, if we were reading aloud, paragraph by painful paragraph, I was going to sit there with my book open to the appropriate page and not read a word ahead. If we were learning to add, I would sit there and learn to add, even if I already had learned that skill at home by keeping score when my grandmother and I played gin.

Mrs. Neff gave me a workbook in which I could teach myself to multiply, but working in that workbook was a privilege and not a right. The more bored I grew, the more I misbehaved, for which I lost the privilege of working in my workbook. Multiplication began to seem like a meal I would never get to eat, because I was too exhausted by my hunger ever to reach the plate. This continued until Mrs. Neff and I each wished the other gone. And since she was the teacher, she had the power to make her wish come true.

Warily, I followed Mr. Spiro to the third floor of our building and then down the main hall, where we entered a narrow door, traversed a short, dark passage, and climbed a few more steps. The room was oddly shaped, with slanted, low ceilings that met at a peak on top. We were in the belfry! You could see it from the playground, where the older kids frightened us with stories about the vampires who lived inside. There was an open window along one wall, but the office was so hot I could barely breathe.

Mr. Spiro settled behind his desk and motioned me to sit beside it. Bushy black curls exploded from his head like the lines a cartoonist draws to indicate that a character is confused or drunk.
Mr. Spiral
, I remember thinking, which is how, four decades later, I can still recall his name. His heavy black brows, gigantic nose, and thickly thatched mustache seemed connected to his glasses, like the disguises you could buy at Woolworth’s. His suit was white, with thin red stripes, like the boxes movie popcorn came in, and he wore a bright red bow tie. This was 1964. I had never seen a man in a shirt that wasn’t white or a suit that wasn’t dark or a tie that called attention to itself, and I felt the thrill and dread any child would feel at being selected from the audience by a clown.

He must have sensed that I distrusted him. “Would you like some Oreos?” Mr. Spiro asked, then slid a packet across the desk.

I can still see those cookies, so chocolaty rich and round, the red thread around their cellophane cocoon just waiting to be unzipped. But a voice in my head warned me to be careful. It was as if that clown had motioned me to sniff the bright pink carnation fastened to his lapel.

“How do I know these cookies aren’t poisoned?”

Those bushy black brows shot up. “Do you really think I would
poison
you?”

“Well,” I said, “you’re a stranger. How do I know you wouldn’t?”

I don’t remember what happened next. He probably reassured me that the Oreos were fit to eat. I don’t remember if I ate them. All I know is that he changed the subject. In a falsely jolly tone, he said, “So! I hear you want to be an authoress!”

If he had asked if I wanted to be an
author
, I would have told him yes. But I had never heard that word,
authoress
, and it seemed dangerous as a snake.
Authoress
, it hissed, like
adulteress
, a word I had encountered in a novel and didn’t quite understand, except to know I didn’t want to be one. “Who told you that?” I demanded.

“Why, your teacher, Mrs. Neff.”

“That’s because she doesn’t like me,” I said. “She probably told you a lot of other lies, but those aren’t true either.”

He began scribbling on a pad, and even a child of eight knows that anything a school psychologist writes about you on a pad can’t be any good. Outside, on the ledge, a pair of plump gray pigeons bobbled back and forth like seedy vaudeville comics (this was the Catskills, after all), pigeon variations of Don Rickles and Buddy Hackett, who sidestepped toward each other, traded a dirty joke, bumped shoulders in raunchy glee, and shuckled back across the stage.

“Well then.” He finished writing. “I hear you’re a very bright little girl, and I would like you to take some tests that are designed to show if you’re smart enough to skip a grade.”

Tests?
I thought.
What kind of tests? Who had suggested I skip a grade?

Then it came to me: Mrs. Neff. If she couldn’t get rid of me any other way, she would skip me a year ahead. I would miss Harry and Eric, the boys I couldn’t resist jabbing in the spine as we walked double file down the hall. But fourth grade had to be less boring than third.
Bring on the tests!
I thought, expecting a mimeographed sheet of addition and subtraction problems or some paragraphs to read aloud.

Mr. Spiro brought out a flipbook. He showed me drawing after drawing, asking me to describe what was missing from each. But how could a person know what was
missing
from a picture if there was nothing to compare it to? Did
every
house have a chimney? Was the daisy
missing
a petal, or had someone merely plucked it?

After we finished with the flipbook, Mr. Spiro brought out a board fitted with colored shapes. He would flash a pattern on a card and ask me to reproduce it. As I recall, he timed me. But as vivid as my memory is for people and events, I have a terrible time remembering patterns and facts. Had the purple triangle been positioned above or below the line? Had the rectangle been blue or green? And who had decreed that playing with colored shapes should determine if a child was ready to skip a grade? It wasn’t enough to be smart; you needed to be smart in the ways grownups wanted you to be smart.